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brrrrrmtoday at 5:49 PM3 repliesview on HN

I checked 3 spots I'm familiar with and 1 is wrong

https://www.oldnyc.org/#707133f-a this is supposed to be here https://www.oldnyc.org/#702487f-a

also, if folks are interested in these old depictions of NYC, check out https://1940s.nyc/ as well!


Replies

gdullitoday at 6:07 PM

An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to process without AI, you have too many results to check for correctness when they come out of the AI.

This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and handwave the correctness.

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lapetitejorttoday at 9:21 PM

Some other historical street view websites:

https://yesterdays.maprva.org/#11.5/37.5438/-77.4392 (specific to Richmond, Virginia, however deployments for other areas are in work)

https://pastvu.com/

danvktoday at 7:06 PM

(Author here) IIUC you're saying that 707133f-a should be at 5th Ave & 9th Street, not 5th Ave & Union Street? Can you say more about why? The text on the back of the first image says "Union St. Station, 5th Ave," which is how it winds up at there. On the other hand, the NYPL page[1] titles the image "Union St. - 18th St."

(I briefly got excited that there might be a street sign _in_ the photo, but if you zoom way in it says "DENTIST")

+1 to 1940s.nyc. Very different photos — those are were taken for tax assessment, the ones on OldNYC were taken to document the city as it changed. The photographer had an arrangement where he'd get tips from demolition crews, and go shoot buildings before they were gone forever.

[1]: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a5e06a0-c539-012f...